Step #4 JOY TO REGENERATE HEALTH

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim, and end of human existence.” Greek philosopher Aristotle almost 2000 years ago.

Have you ever gotten tangled up in an existential crisis commentary in your head around, “What’s the purpose of my life? What am I doing all this for anyway?”

Apparently, its to live a life of pure abundant joy.

Nothing more, nothing less.

There is no declaration that we must climb mountains and earn riches and produce 2.5 children while at it. There is no scroll commanding us to do more than what we can actually bear or to put ourselves in situations that steal our inner light.

But the society we have crafted as humanity sure judges us for our accomplishments, no matter what we paid as the price. Perhaps if we judged each other based on how healthy and joyful someone was we would all focus our energies differently.

Interestingly, various studies on longevity around the globe found happiness as a critical factor of health. One such research resulted in the book The Blue Zones and had some great insights into the people around the World that lived long healthy lives. All the Blue Zone communities had strong community bonds, minimal stress, and daily joyful activities like hanging out and playing chess outside the church (I made that one up as an example!)

But how do you get to the elusive joy? It’s not a simple button that you can switch on at will.

But not everyone’s insanely committed or crazy enough like me to go looking for that switch. So what are the alternatives?

I believe like Mo Gawdat that happiness can be engineered. To paraphrase, it’s the difference between your expectation and your reality. Low expectations = happiness. He gives great examples including his own inspiring story of surviving his son’s untimely death.

Today we know that each cell in our body reacts to our overall mood and vibration. As they say, each cell is listening for instructions and how you feel is a clear message to the cells. When you feel depressed, sad, anxious, cornered or helpless your cells can’t thrive.

In fact, joy is like a muscle that you can build and strengthen by using it constantly. Not feeling joyful? As they say, “fake it till you make it” baby! Just like other muscles in our body that get stronger as we use them, so is the muscle of joy.

The most important reason to “schedule and structure” joy into your life is that it is a feeding loop to the other steps including better diet, exercise, and sleep. You can check out the research studies and summary here. According to various studies, people who are joyful eat healthier, workout more and sleep better!

Having interviewed over 50 of the top MDs and healers in the World I realized that our body only repairs and heals when it’s in a certain state. I call it the HEAL ZONE and we can choose to get in this zone each and every day to ensure our bodies are healthy. I created a list of activities that you can check out for free here to help you get in the heal zone in just minutes.

Heal Zone is a core foundation of each of our Health Bootcamps. They include everything from singing your favorite tune as loudly as you can to dancing with free abandon for 15 minutes to calling someone you love and telling them why you love them.

You also have to remove what I call “joy killers” or people, words and things that rob us of our natural state of happiness. Think of what takes away your smile? Trump news? I would react so visibly that I decided to turn off all TVs around the house as well as mobile news alerts in order to keep my blood pressure in check.

So my HEAL ZONE list also includes things like forgiving someone who has wronged you and taking a day off from listening to the news or getting social media alerts.

Join us for a 14 day JOY challenge by choosing one HEAL ZONE activity a day and write it in your Health Journal to track how you feel at the end of the challenge! Share your experience below, I love hearing from you.

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